From Saigon to America

By Bich Minh Nguyen

April 29, 2015

My father was 27 years old when we fled Saigon on April 29, 1975, the night before the city fell to the North Vietnamese. Like his three brothers, he had been in the South Vietnamese Army, fighting and losing in what is known in Vietnam as the American War.

On the evening of April 29, my father looked at his two young children: my sister, 2 years old, and me, 8 months old. It was late. It was our last chance. So he and my uncles and my grandmother made their decision.

They gathered us up. They filled a knapsack with clothes and food. And then we left our home for good.

To this day, my father says it was luck that got us safely to the Saigon River on motorbikes. Luck that we found our way on a boat that took us out to the open sea where an American naval ship accepted us and brought us to a refugee camp in the Philippines. Eventually we made it to the United States and settled in a small town in Michigan, starting over in a new language.

And so I grew up with the kind of safety my father had never known. Though we lived, those first years, in a run-down neighborhood marked by jagged chain-link fences and “Beware of Dog” signs, we were far from the threat of any war. We had a television that delivered us the news of American life and commercials and sitcoms. For me, English was immediate and easy. For my father, each word could be a struggle.

In one of my earliest memories, we are at a hardware store. We roam the aisles, searching for the one thing my father cannot find. At last, he has to ask someone for help. But he can’t describe what he needs; he doesn’t have the words. The clerk stares at him, speaks louder. My father gets angry, which makes his English even worse. Finally he shakes his head and we leave the store, empty-handed. I never find out what he’s looking for. Even then, I know enough to stay silent. I don’t dare look at my father because I’m afraid of what I’ll see on his face.

But I do see this: Nothing but English will do in this country. For most of my childhood I do little else beyond going to the library and reading books. I read whatever I see in the house: instruction manuals, the backs of cereal boxes. I take the words “English literature” literally and start reading Dickens and Austen, Hardy and the Brontë sisters. I make sure that the words I know are matched to the country we live in, no matter that the cost is the language of Vietnamese, which recedes from my mind as if edged out by all the English words I learn. I did not know how to contain them both. I did not know how to live in both worlds at the same time.

In a way, neither did my father. He was both a young man and a too-quickly aging one. By choice and by matter of circumstance, he would never be fully American. His friends, gathering in the growing community of Vietnamese immigrants on the western side of Michigan, seemed to be the same. Their parties went so late that all of the children would be nearly piled together sleeping on someone’s basement floor by the time the fathers were done with their Cognac and cards.

My father always wanted to stay: He wanted to be wherever he could be Vietnamese again. He was always so joyful with his friends, his very laugh sounding more Vietnamese than American. At home, he had to contend with neighbors who disapproved when my father invited his friends over or when he grilled whole shrimp or chicken satay in the backyard. At home, he sometimes raged. A plate thrown at the wall. Shouts to shut up, be quiet. Once, when I was 12, he slapped me because I looked at him wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that. Though I knew, even as it was happening, that it wasn’t about me.

Decades later, my father and I sat together and Googled an answer to a question I can’t remember now. We Googled because we could, because the world of information was right in front of us.

Suddenly my father said, “I wish we’d had this when you were kids. There was a lot we didn’t know.” My father and I do not usually talk like this. In my mind, we hardly spoke to each other at all while I was growing up. I was afraid of him and afraid for him; I kept out of his way. So I said the only thing I could think of: “Yeah. Things were harder back then.”

Later, I wanted to keep going, to tell him that I wondered what it might have been like to be 27 and to be that brave, to make a decision to change, to save your family’s future.

My father is still a resident alien in the United States. He is the only one of his friends and brothers not to have been back to Vietnam. He says he will go back, just as he says he will become an American citizen one day — one day. He just doesn’t like planes. I can’t help thinking he’s afraid of flying home. He still lives in Michigan, near where we landed as refugees.

Back then, there were almost no Asians in the area. Now there’s practically a Vietnamese enclave, streets where Vietnamese restaurants and Vietnamese signs overrule the American ones. Now, white people go to the Saigon market all the time.

The fall of Saigon, the war, the decisions, the consequences: I don’t know yet how to explain these to my children, who are still too little to demand answers. They do not have to imagine — I do not have to imagine — leaving our house and everything we know in the middle of the night, filled with fear and worry, not knowing where we will end up or even if we will survive. That we do not have to imagine this is an American gift, fraught with historical complication, fraught with the facts of so much loss.

I decide to call my father and ask what he thinks about the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. “It was a long time ago,” he says. “I don’t really think about it. It’s not something to celebrate. It does mean that you’re definitely 40.”

To which I say, “Thanks, Dad.” And, “But it also means that your kids grew up to be totally American.”

He objects to this. “Don’t forget you were born Vietnamese.” I start to say that’s true. But that’s not the correct answer. The answer I give him, for all that it means, all of the care and silence and kindness and rage behind it, the answer he wants to hear, is: “I won’t. I won’t forget.”

Bich Minh Nguyen is the author of three books, most recently “Pioneer Girl.”